


339. highway to hell

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [284]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Sarah teaches Helena to drive. It goes great.





	

Helena stomps the brake and Sarah goes lurching towards the windshield before her seatbelt pulls her back again. The way this is going, she’s going to have a permanent mark on her neck. Seatbelt-scarred.

“ _Ow_ , meathead,” she says.

“Sorry.” Helena frowns down at the pedals and very slowly pushes her foot down. They jump forward a few feet before she slams down the brake again. Sarah lurches forward. Sarah’s seatbelt pulls her back.

“Why can’t I drive the motorcycle,” Helena says plaintively.

“If you think you’re takin’ your kids on that you’re mad,” Sarah says, although at this point she doesn’t really know either. She would rather be anywhere in the world than right here, teaching Helena to drive. But Alison turned green in the face when Sarah asked and firmly declined, Siobhan is preoccupied, and everyone else in their family is a nightmare driver. ( _Specifically_ Cosima. Even Helena, who still doesn’t completely understand how the gas pedal works, is better than Cosima.) So here she is, showing Helena the wonders of starting and stopping a vehicle with your feet and not handlebars.

Helena is still grumbling at the idea of not keeping her babies safe, and they’re moving in little stop-start skips across the empty parking lot. At least they aren’t going to careen into a fence; Helena is almost _too_ careful, worshipful over Alison’s borrowed minivan. They have not gotten anywhere near the fence this entire time. They move in jumps through the middle of the lot.

“I don’t like this,” Helena says. Start. Stop. “Too big.”

“You get used to it,” Sarah says. Start. Stop. She absently considers her hand, white-knuckled around the handle over the window.

“I am not,” Helena says. Start. Stop. “Used to it. I do not go in cars. Much. Only with you. And also Donnie Hendrick. And also Jesse, but we were sitting still, and also we were not looking at window much.” She chortles to herself and the car frantically screeches as it stops.

“Helena,” Sarah says, “promise you can go more than a few feet, yeah?”

“Too fast,” Helena says promptly, and stops them again. When she doesn’t hear a response from Sarah she turns her head to the side; Sarah meets her with a flat, completely unamused expression. Helena’s face wrinkles itself up and she glumly steps on the gas pedal. They move forward. They keep moving forward—

Stop. Sarah jolts forward again.

“Better,” she says, though it’s more of a gasp: the seatbelt has done some possibly-permanent damage to her windpipe.

Helena puts her hands at the top of the steering wheel and carefully – slowly – turns them around so they’re facing the middle of the parking lot again. “I want to be good driver,” she says, “so I can also take people on fun road trips, and to meet with drug dealers.”

“Wait,” Sarah says, but the car’s already stopping again and “ _Helena_ , take your foot off the brake for a few bloody seconds? Please?”

“What if we crash,” Helena says. “On motorbike only me. But in car – also you. What if I crash you.”

“Look,” Sarah says, twisting her voice into something serious – because this is serious, to Helena, she can tell from Helena’s white knuckles on the steering wheel. “If we get _close_ to that fence I will take the bloody wheel from you myself, got it? I’m not dying today in the middle of a bloody parking lot, I can promise you that.”

Helena nods, slowly and then faster. She twists her hands around the steering wheel and lowers her foot onto the gas. Slowly they creep forward, and then a little bit faster, and then Helena is _driving_ and they are trundling merrily along through the parking lot. Thank Christ. Sarah leans her head back against the headrest.

“There you go,” she says, “good girl. You got it.”

“Can I stop,” Helena says plaintively.

“Yeah,” Sarah says, and then hastily adds: “ _slowly_. Slowly.”

They glide to a gentle stop. Helena takes her hands off the steering wheel and eyes Sarah, spooked with delight. Sarah smiles back at her. “Good job,” she says. “You’re driving, Helena.”

“We didn’t die,” Helena says.

“Sure didn’t.”

“I drove,” Helena says.

“Yeah, you did.”

Helena frowns. “Okay,” she says, and shakes her hands out, and delicately puts them back on the wheel. Then she stomps the gas and hurls the minivan forward through the parking lot. “Sarah,” she says loudly, “I think I like driving.”

Sarah has made a horrible mistake. “Glad to hear it,” she says faintly, and waits for death to take her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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